Re: "Usefull languages"

Siyo!
First, what is polysynthesis?

Second, I find it interesting that American students
shy away from French in favor of Spanish in part
because of the spelling.  It's first an indicator of
the problems in traditional second-language education,
beginning focus right from the start on reading and
writing, which is not a natural way to learn a
language.  Then, of course, there is the fact that
Americans study second languages much too late.  And
finally, Americans focus way too much on spelling, not
realizing that the only reasons they do are because
Webster suffered from overweening patriotism and most
bored-stiff pioneers only had his dictionary for
entertainment, so they invented spelling bees.

Dana!
Clint


--- Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
> En réponse à Florian Rivoal
> <florian.rivoal@...>:
>
> >
> > *French
> >         Wonders of a complex orthograph  :)
> >         I can not tell much about what unusual in
> french, since it
> > sounds usual to me.
> >
>
> Well, French is interesting as being the most
> available example of
> polysynthesis (I mean Spoken French of course :)) )
> and of how you can
> completely disfigure a language by means of
> orthography :)) . Want to learn
> about polysynthesis? Don't go so far as learning
> Inuktitut. A trip to France
> will be enough :)) .
>
> By the way, the French orthography is not that bad
> and pretty phonemic (and
> good at showing some grammatical alternations that
> would look rather strange if
> one were to adopt a phonetic orthography :)) ).
> Compared to the English
> orthography, it's the IPA :)) .
>
> Christophe.
>
> http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
>
> Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else
> play the leading role.

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